DDRIG: Automating Blackness: Race, Computing, and Politics in the Postwar United States

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

In the postwar United States, government officials and computer experts sought to advance racial equality through computing. Data banks, databases, and other computerized systems promised to transform how government agencies identified American citizens and delivered services to them. Per this vision, computers would serve as disinterested decision-makers, processing and acting on citizens’ personal data in a manner lacking subjective interpretation or racial bias. However, citizens and racial justice activists warned that poorly designed government computing systems could obfuscate and reify inequalities. This research unpacks this debate and analyzes the systems that emerged from it. It speaks to contemporary concerns about algorithmic bias and inequities in computing and information technologies more broadly. By highlighting the political forces and technical designs that have driven computational inequalities in the past, the dissertation highlights different ways in which the most harmful elements of computing technologies might be dismantled, subverted, or retooled and will be of interest to lawmakers, computing professionals, and scholars committed to creating more just data systems. To this end, this project combines theoretical frameworks from Science and Technology Studies with archival research to examine the racial ideas that shaped the development and use of three different government computing systems: the employment service’s Job Service Matching System, law enforcement’s National Crime Information Center, and public health’s Epidemiologic Surveillance Project. The project asks: how did U.S. government computing systems and social scientific ideas about race complicate and mutually shape one another? How were the technical practices of computerized identification central sites for political and scientific struggles to explain the causes of, and solutions to, various forms of racial inequality in postwar America? How did civil rights activists, community researchers, progressive government officials, and other marginalized technologists envision the relationship between racial equality and government computing? This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.